Cabin fever

Log homes snuggle owners in warmth and sheer coziness

Lenore Campbell and Leo Tims' cabin in Monkton, Md., is made of uniformly machine-milled pine logs that have intriguing knots.

Leo Tims, left, and Lee Campbell built a 2,400-square-foot log cabin-style home in 2004.

For more than 20 summers, Lenore Campbell and Leo Tims
vacationed in a log cabin at Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland.
They were in love with a home for which the structure itself is a
defining element of the decor.

The emotional tug of a log house led them to build their own
five years ago on a pastoral lot in Monkton, Md. The enveloping
warmth of the wood gives the IBM retirees the sense that their home
is snuggling them.

"When you walk in, it puts its arms around you," Tims said.

Cabin-style houses, especially log houses, represent not only
shelter but a lifestyle.

The couple's traditional house with dormers has a wide-plank
front porch, where Campbell has breakfast on warm mornings, and a
breezeway over a side porch that leads to a garage in back. Inside,
logs with intriguing knots, an open kitchen-dining-living area with
a stone hearth and chunky ceiling beams draw the eye. The couple's
Navajo rugs hang over a railing that overlooks the two-story living
area.

The house, made of uniformly machine-milled pine logs, shares 4
acres with a hand-hewn wood cabin that's about 150 years old and
about 20 square feet.

"It's a sense of history. We put something on this property
that's appropriate," Campbell said.

And, she said, they now feel like they're always
vacationing.

With an earthy look, log and cabin-style homes exude relaxation.
Cabins recall a simpler lifestyle in tune with nature, the
perceived romance of taming the frontier and the histories of many
countries. Their enduring style is reflected in more than 25,000
new ones cropping up every year in the United States. Even as
full-time homes, some on small lots, they have the air of a
getaway.

"They are perceptually remote," said Dale Mulfinger, a
Minneapolis architect and author of "Cabinology," a recently
published book on the houses.

Log cabins and their ilk often are thought of as pared-down
retreats so small that the smell of breakfast wakes you because the
coffeepot and skillet are in action a dozen feet from your
nose.

But cabins broadly include the expansive camps in New York's
Adirondack Mountains, in addition to smaller cottages around the
Upper Midwest's lakes and peaked chalets in Colorado's ski country.
Many people include timber-frame and post-and-beam construction
systems, known for high ceilings and open floor plans.

"Now a cabin could be 8,000 square feet," said Eric Johnson,
owner of Solid Wood Promotions, an upstate New York company that
puts on log and timber-frame house shows across the country.

Mulfinger disputes that a house with a mega-bedroom suite and
multicar garage qualifies as a cabin. But all cabin-esque homes
have this in common: "It's defined by space that is flexible and
gets used in several ways. There is more of a general room,"
Mulfinger said.

They're also rustic, or at least very informal, but not
necessarily lacking in conveniences or energy efficiencies.

"An 8-inch-diameter log has an R-21 insulating value," said Andy
Cramer, owner of Monkton Manor Specialties, the builder of the
Campbell-Tims home produced by Tennessee-based Heritage Log Homes.
That value is as high or higher than conventional wall
insulation.

The range of styles and building methods is broad. Whether the
structure is handmade or the materials are factory-produced and
shipped precut, the work is exacting, or else the result is
expensive firewood.

"The log and the timber is all exposed, and every cut has to be
accurate," Cramer said.

Builders also said hybrid designs - houses that combine log,
timber-frame, post-and-beam and stick-built construction methods -
are piquing the interest of buyers.

The costliest and most labor-intensive are the handmade homes,
in which hand-peeled and hand-hewn logs in varying diameters are
fitted together by methods that are hundreds of years old, followed
by cabins that are handcrafted but fitted together through computer
modeling.

"You do not change the shape of the tree; it is tapered. The
difference to the consumer ... is the difference between buying a
coffee mug from a department store and going to a potter to buy
one," said Donald L. Breimhurst, a Pennsylvania timber-home
hand-crafter.

Less costly, but still about $150 or more per square foot, are
more popular homes produced by companies that design the structure
and ship materials, some, all or none of which is precut for
assembly. Campbell and Tims' home, for example, is made of evenly
milled logs that fit together in tongue and groove alignment, but
also have vertical fasteners.

Still, even those houses don't go up overnight: An experienced
crew can take six months to build a 2,000-to-3,000-square-foot
cabin.

Companies offer technical support and workshops for
do-it-yourselfers, but builders warn that the time commitment to
building your own home is extraordinary.